From imagination to reality takes c 15 years......

This is astounding:

On Jan. 19, 1990, Robert D. Ingle, then executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a remarkably prescient memo to his bosses at the newspaper chain Knight Ridder. Typing at night in his breakfast nook on an Apple II PC, he envisioned that a global information network would emerge, giving rise to all manner of online communities. And he proposed an online service, Mercury Center, aimed, his memo said, at "extending the life and preserving the franchise of the newspaper."

This was nearly four years before programmers created the first Web browser and long before Google and social networking exploded onto the scene, yet Ingle seemed to anticipate much of what would come. He laid out strategies for the entire chain: Give information to readers however they wanted it, integrate the print and online operations, and dream up new forms of advertising. "I saw the Internet as a great opportunity, but also as a great threat," says Ingle, who retired in 2000.

Last year Knight Ridder had to perform a fire sale of its Newspaper empire.

To be fair, a lot of the theory was around 15 years ago (I know, we wrote some of it too) but in truth its only been in the last c 5 years that the combination of bandwidth, user base and economics has made it realistic. The question really is what makes large organisations resist change when it finally becomes clear it is coming. Machiavelli of course nailed it quite well 500 years ago.

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger."

I've been re-reading Jared Diamond's Collapse (the story about what makes societies collapse) to see if there are any points of learning for industries, and yes there are subtleties but its actually very simple - a combination of over-reliance on what works well initially to the point of "overfishing" in those waters, plus an ossifying socio-political structure that makes it impossible to change from within.

Its fashionable of course to laugh at the Newspaper industry, but most other media industries are just the next bandwidth shift away, and next are any industries that make heavy use of the web to sell or internet to trade.